Handling the thorns of mainline for the real time patch

There are many banes that exist in mainline Linux that the real-time kernel must deal with. Most of them have to do with SMP, as real-time and SMP do not go well together, and they are all thorns in the side of the real-time kernel developers. These include per_cpu variables, reader-writer locks and semaphores and CPU hotplug. This session will discuss clever ways to handle these issues. Special locks for per-cpu variables, multi locks for reader/writer, and perhaps (if there's time) how to go about redesigning hotplug and workqueues. Each of these currently have hacks to get around the problems. This session's goal is to convert these hacks to elegant solutions. It will be more of a discussion than a presentation.

Required attendees: Thomas Gleixner, Peter Zijlstra, Clark Williams.

Topic Lead: Steven Rostedt
Steven is the current maintainer of the stable real time trees (3.0-rt and 3.2-rt). He is also one of the original developers of the -rt patch (originally called the realtime-preempt patch). He now works for Red Hat under the MRG (Messaging Real-Time Grid) division (obviously for the 'R' part). He has also developed parts of the real-time scheduler in mainline Linux. He also dabbles in other parts of the kernel and is the maintainer of Ftrace (the kernel tracing infrastructure).